Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870, which features GPU core speed of 1000 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870, in theory, should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 140800 (1100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is much (approximately 809%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71200 (809%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is a lot (more or less 627%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 5550, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27600 (627%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.